When preparing to install MySQL, you should decide which version
to use, and which distribution format (binary or source) to use
for the installation.

First, decide if you want to install a development release or a GA
release. Development releases have the newest features, but are
not recommended for production use. GA (General Availability)
releases, also called production or stable releases, are meant for
production use. We recommend to use the most recent GA release.

The naming scheme in MySQL 5.5 uses release names
that consist of three numbers and a suffix; for example,
mysql-5.6.1-m1. The numbers
within the release name are interpreted as follows:

The first number (5) is the
major version and describes the file format. All MySQL 5
releases have the same file format.

The second number (6) is the
release level. Taken together, the major version and release
level constitute the release series number.

The third number (1) is the
version number within the release series. This is incremented
for each new release. Usually you want the latest version for
the series you have chosen.

For each minor update, the last number in the version string is
incremented. When there are major new features or minor
incompatibilities with previous versions, the second number in the
version string is incremented. When the file format changes, the
first number is increased.

Release names can also include a suffix that indicates the
stability level of the release. Releases within a series progress
through a set of suffixes to indicate how the stability level
improves. The possible suffixes are:

If there is no suffix, it indicates that the release is a
General Availability (GA) or Production release. GA releases
are stable, having successfully passed through all earlier
release stages and are believed to be reliable, free of
serious bugs, and suitable for use in production systems. Only
critical bugfixes are applied to the release.

mN (for
example, m1,
m2,
m3, ...) indicate a milestone
number. MySQL development uses a milestone model, in which
each milestone proceeds through a small number of versions
with a tight focus on a small subset of thoroughly tested
features. Following the releases for one milestone,
development proceeds with another small number of releases
that focuses on the next small set of features, also
thoroughly tested. Features within milestone releases may be
considered to be of pre-production quality.

rc indicates a Release
Candidate. Release candidates are believed to be stable,
having passed all of MySQL's internal testing, and with all
known fatal runtime bugs fixed. However, the release has not
been in widespread use long enough to know for sure that all
bugs have been identified. Only minor fixes are added.

Once you've chosen which MySQL version to install, you need to
decide which distribution to
install for your operating system. For most use cases,
a binary distribution is the right choice. Binary distributions
are available in native format for many platforms, such as RPM
packages for Linux, or DMG packages for OS X. Distributions are
also available in more generic formats such as Zip archives or
compressed tar files. On Windows, you can use
the MySQL Installer to
install a binary distribution.

Under some circumstances, you may be better off installing MySQL
from a source distribution:

You want to install MySQL at some explicit location. The
standard binary distributions are ready to run at any
installation location, but you might require even more
flexibility to place MySQL components where you want.

You want to configure mysqld to ensure that
features are available that might not be included in the
standard binary distributions. Here is a list of the most
common extra options that you may want to use to ensure
feature availability:

You want to configure mysqld without some
features that are included in the standard binary
distributions. For example, distributions normally are
compiled with support for all character sets. If you want a
smaller MySQL server, you can recompile it with support for
only the character sets you need.

You want to use the latest sources from one of the Git
repositories to have access to all current bugfixes. For
example, if you have found a bug and reported it to the MySQL
development team, the bugfix is committed to the source
repository and you can access it there. The bugfix does not
appear in a release until a release actually is issued.

You want to read (or modify) the C and C++ code that makes up
MySQL. For this purpose, you should get a source distribution.

Source distributions contain more tests and examples than
binary distributions.